the Female Body GOVERNING

“Doing What Comes Naturally . . .” 239
represented as a private practice between a couple (and their doctors),
is a surveilled public practice whose meanings have to be negotiated and
managed in the public domain. Furthermore, that this discursive work
is necessary highlights the extent to which reproduction, particularly for
women, is normatively prescribed, and the failure to do so always has to
be accounted for; those who do not engage with treatment are potentially
“guilty” and their consciences cannot be clear. Voluntary childlessness,
then, is rendered the discursive Other against which the conformity—or
normality—of those experiencing IVF failure can be defi ned. This is
important in the context of the NICE recommendations discussed earlier
because in the face of free treatment, the decision not to have IVF risks
becoming an act of “refusal,” denoting a voluntary element to the life
without children. Where IVF is seen as an extension of the “natural”
reproductive process, those women who “refuse” free treatment risk
being evaluated by others as “too selfi sh” to perform the reproductive
labor of normative femininity. Therefore, the nonmother who “refuses”
treatment is rendered as lacking the self-sacrifi cial qualities of normative
(“natural”) womanhood/motherhood.
However, in itself, an engagement with IVF does not unproblematically
constitute “doing everything possible” because the technology
remains one of seemingly endless possibility, always offering the “maybenext-time”
promise of success that postpones the end of treatment.
What constitutes “everything,” then, is never clear, and when treatment
fails, can only be determined retrospectively and discursively. One of
the primary strategies through which this is endpoint is discursively
achieved is through the mobilization of a discourse of desperation,
and in particular, the figure of the “desperate infertile woman.” The
desperate infertile woman is a rhetorical figure, much beloved of
media representations of IVF and its associated technologies, signifying
immoderation and irrational excess; she is “obsessed” with treatment,
even to the point of financial ruin and relationship breakdown, and is
willing to go to any lengths to have a genetic child. While the epithet
“desperate” clearly signifies the intense desire to have a child—a desire
that is normatively prescribed as “natural” in women—it also signifies
an unsuitability to be a parent. The “desperate infertile woman,” then,
is not only a nonmother, but her excess and immoderation renders her
a “bad mother” (May, 1998), and therefore constitutes an identity that
has to be strongly repudiated by the women in the accounts:
Susan: I didn’t want to be one of those women that you saw on
television, that are sort of in their 50s, that have had sort of like
hundreds and hundreds of it. And it does take over your life. I didn’t